In the wake of the ongoing deregulations of the electric power markets, load transmission and wheeling of power from distant generators to local consumers has become common practice. As a consequence of the competition between utilities and the emerging need to optimize assets, increased amounts of electric power are transmitted through the existing networks, invariably causing congestion, transmission bottlenecks and/or oscillations of parts of the power transmission systems. In this regard, electrical transmission networks are highly dynamic. In general, electromagnetic oscillations in electric power systems comprising several alternating current generators have a frequency of less than a few Hz and considered acceptable as long as they decay. They are initiated by the normal small changes in the system load, and they are a characteristic of any power system. However, insufficiently damped oscillations may occur when the operating point of the power system is changed, e.g. due to a new distribution of power flows following a connection or disconnection of generators, loads and/or transmission lines. Likewise, the interconnection of several existing power grids, even if the latter do not individually present any badly damped oscillations prior to their interconnection, may give rise to insufficiently damped oscillations. In these cases, an increase in the transmitted power of a few MW may make the difference between stable oscillations and unstable oscillations which have the potential to cause a system collapse or result in lost of synchronism, lost of interconnections and ultimately the inability to supply electric power to the customer. Appropriate monitoring of the power system can help a network operator to accurately assess power system states and avoid a total blackout by taking appropriate actions such as the connection of specially designed oscillation damping equipment.
In the Patent Application EP-A 1 489 714, an adaptive detection of electromechanical oscillations in electric power systems is based on a linear time-varying model. A system quantity or signal such as e.g. the amplitude or angle of the voltage or current at a selected node of the network is sampled, and the parameters of the linear model representing the behaviour of the power system are estimated by means of Kalman filtering techniques. This process is carried out in a recursive manner, i.e. every time a new value of the system quantity is measured the parameters of the model are updated. Finally, from the estimated parameters of the model, the parameters of the oscillatory modes, such as frequency and damping, are deduced and presented to an operator. This adaptive identification process enables a real-time analysis of the present state of the power system, comprising in particular the damping ξ and frequency f of the dominant power oscillation mode, i.e. the mode with the lowest relative damping ratio.
In order for such an estimation of dynamic model parameters to work properly, the estimation has to be initialized by a set of properly chosen tuning parameters, such as the order of the dynamic model, the process and measurement noise, cut-off frequencies for signal pre-filters etc. In general, the values of the tuning parameters depend on the particular power system being monitored and on the particular signal being selected as the input for the monitoring algorithm. These values are then being adjusted or tuned by a commissioning engineer who analyzes the respective input signal and makes sure that the output of the subsequent estimation process, i.e. the estimated dominant frequency and damping, responds sufficiently fast and is not too sensitive with respects to measurement noise. In particular, the commissioning engineer has to adjust the values of the tuning parameters in such a way that an estimation error given by the difference between the measured signal and the signal predicted e.g. by the aforementioned linear time-varying model is minimal, and the captured oscillatory modes(s) of interest are estimated precise enough using a possibly small order of the dynamic model. It has turned out that this tuning procedure may be time intensive and requires a certain level of knowledge and experience of the commissioning engineer.
To identify oscillations in an electric power system, different system quantities such as amplitudes or phase angles of voltages, currents and power flows can be used as inputs to the proposed identification procedure. However, these signals differ with respect to their statistical properties such as magnitudes and signal variance. In order to simplify the tuning procedure, i.e. to find the best initial values of the tuning parameters to start the estimation algorithm, the abovementioned European Patent Application proposes to introduce a signal conditioning for all admissible measurements obtained from the power system being monitored.